One thing (among many) that Fallout: New Vegas gets right which its sort-of spiritual successor The Outer Worlds gets wrong is how to pull off ridiculous worldbuilding.
The worldbuilding of Fallout: New Vegas is incredibly silly. There's a faction of Elvis impersonators, a faction of Mongol cosplayers, and a faction of Rome cosplayers. There's a cult of zombies trying to reach the promised land via an old rocket, and one of the members is a human who deluded himself into thinking he's a zombie.
The reason for why it works so well is that while it's ridiculous to us, it's not ridiculous to them. The narrative treats these people and their lives seriously because as people, they would take their own lives seriously, no matter how silly they are to us.
In The Outer Worlds the factions are also ridiculous. But the problem is that the narrative is also ridiculous and doesn't take itself seriously. The first region of the game involves a corporate town that's dying from a "plague" which turns out to be scurvy because even though they've got FTL technology, they don't know about vitamins.
The characters are incredibly dumb, making decisions that make no sense and devaluing their own lives and circumstances for the sake of the joke. It really cheapens the setting and the plot and makes me resent them rather than treasure them.
